


Afterlife

by ion_bond



Category: The Mummy Series
Genre: AU, Ancient Egypt, Canon - Movie, Cuddling & Snuggling, Death, Eternity, F/F, Rebirth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-23
Updated: 2008-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:43:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1624916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ion_bond/pseuds/ion_bond
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Rick and Jonathan couldn't rescue Evelyn in Hamunaptra? What if Ankhsunamun brought her back? Evelyn/Ankhsunamun femslash AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Afterlife

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Kate Bolin, who was no doubt assigned a perfectly good pinch-hitter, though that person wasn't me. Sorry, I couldn't resist.

 

 

Ankhsunamun says the old words. On the dais, the woman's eyes move under her lids, and Ankhsunamun continues to speak, watching, never halting. She does not need the Book. If she had it, it would not help, for she was not taught to read. 

The woman's skin is as pale as the milk from a heavenly cow, and her hair curls around her face, finer than the finest wig Ankhsunamun ever owned. Her still chest rises and she blinks, coughs, sits up. She was born long after Ankhsunamun died. Imhotep brought her to this room and ended her life. 

They are surrounded by bodies. There are the priests, preserved for eternity but no longer animate, many of them with limbs hewn off in the battle. There are the warriors, who came after the woman and fought for her. In life, they were strange and frightening in their foreign clothing, but their corpses look like anyone else -- like children. No one is left to wash the blood from their faces and perform the embalming rights, so they will rot like fruit in the sun, they will never live again. 

Ankhsunamun wonders if the woman will be saddened to see this. She grasps her forearms like a sister, and pulls her to her feet. The woman's fingers move, experimentally, against Ankhsunamun's skin, but do not grip. She stands, swaying like a reed. Ankhsunamun steadies her and waits as she looks around the chamber. 

The stale air must still seem wrong in her lungs, as if she is swallowing sand. Ankhsunamun knows the feeling. It will pass. "Can you speak?" she asks.

"Where -- where is he?"

Imhotep's body lies at the foot of the alter. Ankhsunamun isn't sure to whom the woman's question refers, but the answer is not difficult, in this city. "Dead."

The sun rises and sets, and in a room where blue-glazed ushabtis stand sentinel in niches, she helps the woman into sandals with soles made of gold beaten thinner than sheets of papyrus. She fits gold covers onto the tips of the woman's fingers. She places a diadem decorated with two tiny gold antelopes onto her head and smoothes the white linen under her breasts. This is maidservant work, but Ankhsunamun does not mind. Something about this stranger reminds her of the Great King's wife. She feels as if she is in a dream as she traces the odd round eyes with kohl. 

There is a rhythm after all rhythms have stopped. This is life after life. 

It is different from what came before. Ankhsunamun remembers. She remembers the ache in her shoulders at the end of a day of wringing out wet clothing, and the taste of lentils stewed in a pot over the fire, the feel of a razor against her scalp, and hands on her buttocks, soft hands not accustomed to work. The incense in the palace. Frustration, exhaustion, anger, lust. Imhotep told her that her ka and his were linked. He was her owner, not the Great King. She was his owner. They would belong to each other forever. She remembers all the words he said. 

The incense they burned used to make her eyes sting, and she squinted into the sun that gleamed off the surface of the river. Now she can see in the dark. 

They stand together and Ankhsunamun holds up a polished bronze disk. There they are, she and this stranger. They are evening and morning, Sekhmet and Hathor, danger and love. 

"Am I ready, now? Where are we going?" the woman asks, as if she does not understand that there will be no more journeys. She is young. 

They lie together in a bed. Ankhsunamun kisses along the round of her stomach, her tongue tracing a wet Nile straight down from the navel, reaching the delta where her legs meet. At first, she had hair here, like a barbarian, but Ankhsunamun shaved it off. Now, new stubble grabs at the skin of her lips. The woman's hair and nails are still growing, for she is alive. Ankhsunamun, licking her where she is as wet and ripe as a dom-palm fruit, gave her all of this. 

She is tense, her muscles work. "Do you know what a _ghost_ is? I don't know your word for it, if you have one." She tilts her pelvis forward, and Ankhsunamun holds it carefully, like a dish of oil. "A dead person. A spirit without a body to house it."

Ankhsunamun raises her head. "In the world beneath, I was like this. I waited, for dynasties. My ba remained in the world above. Nothing was real until we were reunited."

The woman sighs. "I don't remember waiting. Only waking."

"You are lucky," Ankhsunamun tells her. "You were not gone long." An eyeblink, in the face of eternity. This, what they have now, needs never end.

The days are hot. The nights are cold. Sometimes, the two of them cut across the dunes like sand in the wind, hand in hand. They go on short forays, never far. Ankhsunamun recalls how it used to feel to walk across the baked land until her feet were tired and her heart beat hard in her chest. 

Imhotep had a mission. He raised an army. They don't do that. They meet no one but the jackals.

More often, they stay in the City of the Dead. They explore the most sacred places. They do not disturb the funereal treasures of those who still wait in the tombs, but they mount all the alters and try the thrones meant for living rulers. They lie together on the biers. "I think I might be a _ghost,_ " the woman says, and then she repeats the sentence in her own language. The first time, her voice sounds sad. The second time, it is hard to tell. 

She does not appreciate her living, breathing body. She is not grateful, not the way Ankhsunamun is still grateful to Imhotep, whom she struck down. She betrayed him, but it isn't the betrayal she remembers.

"Do you remember love, anymore?" the woman asks. "The feeling of being in love?" Ankhsunamun feels a dagger to her belly and three thousand years of dust. She doesn't know, but she thinks she wants them to lie side by side forever. 

She is very old. She understands what forever means.

FIN.

 


End file.
